Modern Meadow, a startup based in Brooklyn, New York, is aiming to commercialize leather and meat products that are not made from slaughtered animals but brewed in cell-culture vats. If it works, and if the market embraces the resulting products, it would lead to vast savings in water, land, and energy use associated with livestock production.

Company CEO and cofounder Andras Forgacs—who previously cofounded Organovo, a company that uses 3-D printers to create human tissue for biomedical applications—spoke today at EmTech and later sat down with David Talbot, chief correspondent of MIT Technology Review.